For only the second time since Big Blue entered the Unix market for real in February 1990 with the launch of the RS/6000 line of workstations and servers, the company is letting customers who use its Power-based servers take a future AIX release for a test drive in an open beta program

As usual - 'test program' which expects you to have so weird dev accounts, pay some fees, have some spacecraft in your garage ... too bad they're just too close to release a simple 'trial' to test the software on your own.

There are no fees and the only account is a free IBM ID needed for the Developerworks site. You do have to have a POWER4 or later server to carve out a little resource for an LPAR to install the beta code into.